This blog post discusses the Fourth Circuit’s ruling regarding “literally false” advertising claims. The case is In re GNC Corp., 789 F.3d 505 (2015). I. Factual Background GNC, a national nutritional products retailer, has manufactured and sold a line of joint health supplements for years. These products, which contain glucosamine and chondroitin compounds, are marketed collectively under the “TriFlex” brand. The TriFlex product label represents that the supplements “promote[] joint mobility & flexibility,”.. Read More

In early 2016, Google DeepMind unveiled the AlphaGo project, a gaming algorithm based on machine learning and dedicated to the last remaining game where humans held superior against computers—Go, the ancient Chinese board game. The AlphaGo algorithm was “fed” a database of over 30 million moves, and was subject to reinforcement learning. This allowed the algorithm to optimize the search space of actions, reducing the required calculations to optimize AlphaGo’s next move… Read More